


Still waters run deep

by phenoob



Category: Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier & Related Fandoms
Genre: Curiosity, Daydreaming, F/F, Gen, Implied Relationships, Mild Humour, POV First Person, POV projecting onto the comic relief, Queer Undertones, References to Canon, Social Anxiety, Unconventional Power Fantasy, incidentally my third fic in a row where stuff gets dropped/broken, the book canon in particular fyi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 05:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28861686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phenoob/pseuds/phenoob
Summary: “Still waters certainly run deep,” Mrs. Van Hopper had said to the news of my engagement. I could imagine her saying much the same as she glanced flippantly round Rebecca’s room, and then, “Well, are you going to just stand there, or show me the room?”
Relationships: Mrs. Danvers (Rebecca)/Rebecca de Winter
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	Still waters run deep

**Author's Note:**

> Mrs. Van Hopper doesn't show up in much fic, does she? This is probably a bigger word count than it needs to be but I decided to just hit post. As tags suggest, the Danny/Rebecca ship is strongly implied but ambiguous due to POV.

I was up early that morning, dull-eyed and haggard after a night of bad dreams. Perhaps fate was punishing me for my initial childish _joie de vivre_ in Maxim’s absence. He would be back in the evening, and it seemed a vast, unhappy stretch of time until then. I did not like being alone anymore.

Since last afternoon, there was always the inkling that I was not really alone at all. Those hateful eyes were like two blots of ink upon my brain, dark and persistent. Could they be watching me now? Peeping through the crack of a door as I went down to the library?

In search of a distraction, I gathered my sketching materials and art books directly after breakfast, and brought them to the morning room. I scribbled feverish mimics of Dutch still lifes in charcoal and graphite. Vanitas and banquet pieces could not occupy my mind for long, though. Not in this room, not with Rebecca’s writing on display all along the docketed pigeon-holes, the rhododendron blossoms casting a rosy glow upon the walls and filling my nostrils with their heady scent.

 _I feel her everywhere,_ Mrs. Danvers had said, _You do too, don’t you?_

Her hand on my arm; the dreadful, ingratiating voice in my ear. I did not want to think about yesterday afternoon.

I could not stop thinking about it. For all my horror I had to admit that my demented escapade, which could only loosely be called a tour, had left me more curious than ever.

Were I a braver person, I thought, I should go back to the west wing and hear everything Mrs. Danvers had to say about the years she spent at Rebecca’s side. Interrupt her, even; ask questions. What did Rebecca do up in London, and down at the boathouse? What had she and Mrs. Danvers— _‘Danny’_ —talked about all those late nights in front of the dressing-table, brushes in hand?

Somehow I could tell this was not the normal, forgivable curiosity of a second bride. I felt snobbish for it, and unhealthy too.

My thoughts went back to Mrs. Van Hopper. Perched like a peacock atop her sofa cushion in the lounge of Hôtel Côte d’Azur, gossip was a sort of religious calling to her, the lorgnette round her neck an essential part of her very being.

Was this what drove her on, I wondered, this nagging curiosity I felt? Was Manderley making me into another Mrs. Van Hopper?

Sometimes I thought so, peering into the desk in the morning room, examining a handkerchief from the pocket of another woman’s macintosh. I felt pig-eyed and clumsy-handed. A monstrous velvet cap skewered with a quill belonged upon my head, hair hanging lank and dull beneath it, a lorgnette in the clammy grip of my brittle-nailed fingers.

No, there was a crucial difference: I was desperately, agonizingly shy. Shyness was something Mrs. Van Hopper had never known. Burdensome as it was, there were times it seemed to be the last thread keeping me from utter snobbery.

I wondered then: what would Mrs. Van Hopper do in my place today? Suppose, by magic, she came from across the ocean like an incredibly fast hot air balloon, and usurped me right here in the morning room?

I could see her sitting before the desk as I did now, hips bulging slightly over the edge of the chair, her ruffled lime-green blouse and purple skirt like a splash of poster paint on a Rembrandt. It would be afternoon, because this was the morning room, and Mrs. Van Hopper would not squander the opportunity to bend Manderley tradition.

Like me, Mrs. Van Hopper would be afflicted with a wretched and feverish curiosity about Manderley’s past. Unlike me, she would not deny herself a chance to gratify it.

She would ring Mrs. Danvers up on the house telephone and say, in that bark she used with all servants regardless of their seniority, “I want to see the west wing again. Go make it up, why don’t you, and fast; I’d like to be through all the rooms before dinner,” and she would squash her cigarette butt in the rhododendrons, pick up her lorgnette and peer out at a figure on the lawn.

Alas, it would only be Robert, stacking the chairs beneath the chestnut tree to bring them inside after tea—as for this ‘silly’ English custom, the scones and cakes would have already swayed her opinion for the better, and she would have partaken in her tea that afternoon in sanctimonious silence. Failing Robert, Mrs. Van Hopper would turn to her hand mirror and renew the spots of rouge on her cheeks, clown-like, and apply another bow shape to her lips, doing so automatically and unseeingly, the corner of her mouth twitching in amused anticipation of the tour that awaited her.

The west wing would be her promised land. Each treasure she remembered from the last visit—for in my fancy I supposed she should inherit my memories—would be twinkling in her mind’s eye, each with a story of its own, each potentially a source of gossip and sordid speculation about Rebecca, about Maxim ... about Mrs. Danvers?

Most likely. After all, lowbrow authors, actors and journalists were not beneath Mrs. Van Hopper’s lorgnette; surely the housekeeper of a place like Manderley should not be either, especially not one who had so scandalously performed all the duties of the late Mrs. de Winter’s personal maid—perhaps more?—and now kept the west wing in immaculate condition as a sort of private memorial.

“Still waters certainly run deep,” Mrs. Van Hopper had said to the news of my engagement. I could imagine her saying much the same as she glanced flippantly round Rebecca’s room, and then, “Well, are you going to just stand there, or show me the room?”

Mrs. Danvers would not be able to lead her round like a broken doll. Her iron grip of the arm would be ineffectual, brushed off like a child’s. Her horrible false, saccharine manner, if she bothered with it at all, would be taken for genuine familiarity. The resentful edge to her glowing reminiscences would go unnoticed. Mrs. Van Hopper would not be fazed.

I could see her five minutes later, brushing a candlestick with a greasy fingertip and, “Danny,” she should say, with a roar of laughter, “What a name. You’ll let me call you Danny?” To this she would not wait for any kind of answer. “Rebecca came up with that, did she? She certainly was a clever one.”

Would Mrs. Danvers flinch at the fingerprints left on the fine silver and gilt pieces? At the callous use of her familiar name? She would at least flinch at the name ‘Rebecca,’ surely nothing short of profanity on Mrs. Van Hopper’s tongue.

She would seem such a frail, pathetic slip of a thing next to the velvet-clad bulk of her new employer, and demure as a nun, standing rigid with her hands clasped before her while Mrs. Van Hopper stomped and gesticulated and opened drawers unbidden. Mrs. Danvers would not be imposing at all. Not as she was with me.

“This set she hadn’t worn, you say,” Mrs. Van Hopper would say, turning an incredulous eye upon the pink silk underthings in one of the drawers, “How you remember that is beyond me.” Mrs. Danvers would give some innocuous reply to the effect that she was used to keeping track of her mistress’s laundry. Mrs. Van Hopper would harp on the matter: “It’s more that you’d think to mention that sort of detail at all. You English do have an odd notion of privacy, you must admit. I can’t say I’ll ever get used to the idea of somebody else dressing me up all the time, or putting on my rouge. You did everything for Rebecca, you say? Everything?”

“I did say that,” would come the most lifeless of voices, reluctant, quiet as a feather.

Mrs. Van Hopper would look conspiratorially at her housekeeper. Her voice would drop low, intimate, a friend to a friend, and “You know, Danny,” she would say, “There’s no need to be shy with me. Your employment is safe in my hands, for what it’s worth. I doubt there’s anyone in this heavens-forsaken moorland that can keep a place like Manderley running as well as you, so I’m willing to look past any little eccentricities you might have. I’m a worldly woman, after all. It would take the Devil himself to shock me. Hah! Only I’d like to know as much as I can about the glory days, now that I’ve taken up the reins here; I’m sure you understand. Don’t you?”

“Of course, Madam,” Mrs. Danvers would say. She would make a valiant effort to hide her discomfort. A slightly-bulging vein on the forehead, perhaps.

“Splendid,” Mrs. Van Hopper would say. “Tell me, Danny—in your time with the late mistress,” she would begin, at length, and look from the drawer of underclothes, back to Mrs. Danvers. “Have you done anything you shouldn’t?”

No.

Even Mrs. Van Hopper would not imply—would not imply what? I did not know where exactly my mind had ventured just then, and was not sure I wanted to know. In any case, Mrs. Van Hopper would say some very tactless things, and keep Mrs. Danvers constantly on alert for possible breakages besides.

And Mrs. Danvers: would she worry at her skirts with her fingertips? Would she tell dull, unconvincing tales, as I had done to explain my presence in the room? Would she feel as much discomfort as I had that afternoon? Would she stumble out into the hall when it was over, flee to the safety of her own quarters and sit brooding upon her bed, with the door locked and the key in her pocket? Would she dread the ring of the house telephone?

The ring of the house telephone. Sharp as a sword the sound cut through my thoughts, and reality rushed back to meet me. I was the timid one once more. I was the one starting up in alarm, lifting the receiver in trembling hands.

“What is it?” I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Forgive me if I startled you, Madam,” came the voice I feared, “I’ve only called to ask if you wished to see me, and to approve today’s menu. It is the usual time.”

I sat there dumbly, trying not to breathe too hard into the mouthpiece, until I heard, with a touch of impatience, “Are you busy, Madam? Shall I call again later?”

“No,” I said in a strange, shrill peep of a voice, “It’s all right, Mrs. Danvers, I’m not busy. I’ll have a look at the menu.” I quested the desk with one frantic hand in search of the menu card, brushing away stray leafs of paper and half-done sketches due for the waste basket.

My elbow bumped into something. It was my can of sketching utensils. I tried to rescue it but was too late; the can fell off of the desk with a resounding metallic crash and a clatter of pencils, paintbrushes and sticks of charcoal rolling out every which way along the floor. All clearly audible over the house telephone. I still held the receiver to my ear. Silence at the end of the line.

I tried to speak and could not. I could only wait, face aflame, my fingers on the receiver grown slick with perspiration, until finally, “Madam,” said the voice, “Are you quite all right?”

“I’m perfectly all right, Mrs. Danvers,” I said, in a breathless tone that said I was not, and began to babble. “I’m so sorry about all that. Oh, nothing broke, Mrs. Danvers, don’t worry. Those were my things anyway. I was silly enough to put them too close to the edge of the desk.”

Another excruciating silence.

“I'm glad to hear that, Madam,” said Mrs. Danvers, “It would have been a pity to have a second breakage in the morning room.” No doubt to compound my shame with memories of the first breakage. I said nothing. “Alice will be down directly to tidy up the room,” she said.

“No, Mrs. Danvers; that is, actually, yes, I suppose that would be a good idea. Thank you.” I moved my foot slightly and saw a pencil roll across the floor, beneath a cabinet.

A click of the receiver, and the call was done. I sank forward over the desk, face in hands, heavy and tremulous as though I had run a mile. I could see the menu card peeking out from beneath the sketchbook. Roast veal again, with a wine sauce; the blank space for sauce had been filled in advance.

I sat up abruptly as I realized Mrs. Danvers had ended the call without asking me again to review the menu. Surely not out of mercy. More likely my blunders had finally got to her and she could feign politeness no longer. Or perhaps she had been holding back a fit of scornful laughter. It did not matter. I was thankful.

If I left quickly I might escape a hallway encounter with Alice. I stood on legs weak as straw and tiptoed round the various utensils on the floor. As I left the room, still pink with shame, a bizarre thought occurred to me.

I rather envied Mrs. Van Hopper.


End file.
